


your own man

by m_feys



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Eventual acceptance, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Spousal Abuse, One Shot, Trans Duck Newton, Transphobia, dont worry it ends on a happy note, duck's childhood, trans headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-28 23:36:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17192348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_feys/pseuds/m_feys
Summary: "I know you're not a friend of my mom, 'cause you're callin' me 'Duck'. And I know she hates that."





	your own man

Duck was a nickname. But he didn't like to be called anything else.

His mother abhorred it, of course, saying her daughter had a real name and it would do for people to use it. She had always been real formal.  
It was how she got by. A single mother keeping her distance from any prying questions about a father, with manners and propriety.  
She and Duck butted heads about it, one of the many things they disagreed on.

His father had come back. For a few years. From when Duck was about seven to nine. He hadn't liked that time.  
His mother got quiet and careful when she was always loud and strict. And lots of times late in the night his father was yelling and slurring drunk.  
Duck never called him dad. In the end, maybe he was kinda stubborn about formality too.

His little sister was the best thing in the world though, as far as Duck was concerned. Even if maybe he hadn't always understood that. But suddenly it wasn't just him and his mom. Suddenly, they had someone else in their tiny family in a way that was so _completely_ different from when his father came back. Instead of an intruder, she was an integral part that had been missing.

Jane was always overly serious, like their mom, but had kindness in spades and was endlessly generous with it. She wouldn't have understood a _lick_ of what he was saying if he'd tried to explain why he was who he was to her, but that was ok. Because she was on his side when he came back from college, two years on hormones, and came out to his mother.

She had railed against it. Had cried. Had mourned and lamented over the loss of her daughter. Duck supposed he couldn't blame her because he came back with a new voice and no formal, spoken, warning. But none of it felt new to him.

He had slouched into who he was as a teenager; being slumped alone with trees for company meant he had been avoiding it too, at the same time. And long hours in the woods really can solidify who you are and your worldview, as little as Duck had been motivated to do anything about it for the longest time.  
But at eighteen, nightmares woke him up, as well as some damn good soup and he realized he was missing out on his life when he needed to live it. So, making himself who he wanted to be, college, the forestry service, made sense. The trees had served him for all his life, it was as much as he could do to serve them back.

And when he came back as a new man, the town had blinked. Then all the people, people who had known him since he was a child, seemed to accept that this was still _Duck_. And if there was a new confidence in his step, well then that was just Duck stepping into himself.

So yeah, he'd been Duck for a long, long time, even if his mother hadn't wanted to accept it.

She had come around though, before she died. _That_ he was glad of.

She still never called him Duck. When she called to apologize, said he was his own man now (words that made him cry, he wasn't ashamed to admit). She'd called him by the name he'd legally changed it to. It was something traditionally masculine and proper, something she'd approved of, certainly. Over that call, she'd said it shakily, but every time after that, she'd always said it with a note of pride. _That_ he was proud of.

**Author's Note:**

> i dont always reply to comments but they are always appreciated ^^


End file.
